The Last Jedi’s final frames are not concerned with anyone “of note” in their galaxy. He’s a poor, enslaved child on Canto Bight who is now sporting Rose’s resistance ring. He reaches for a broom to sweep up, and the broom flies to his hand from a distance—he has the Force. He stares off into the night sky, much like Luke Skywalker stared into a Tatooine sunset decades before. He sees a shooting star. In effect, the end of Episode VIII wants its audience to acknowledge a shift in the galaxy: the Force is changing. When the new tide rises, perhaps no one will be barred from it.

This sense that “the Force belongs to everyone now!” has resonated with fans for good reason. Though there was never anything stopping sentient beings in the Star Wars galaxy from being Force-sensitive, there were many structures in place that prevented people from learning about that sensitivity and using it. Prior to Order 66, if you wanted to know about the Force, you had to be given to the Jedi Order by your parents in infancy. There weren’t many other avenues open to those whose parents made a different choice for them, who had the abilities but none of the knowledge. You could become a Sith apprentice, or maybe you were lucky enough to be born on a rare planet possessing a large Force-wielding population like Dathomir, but that was pretty much it. ...

Rey has always had some inkling that the Force was within her, but it suddenly flipped into overdrive. Her power is expanding, as her understanding of this strange sense has magnified. Rey isn’t just any old Force-sensitive being in their galaxy; her abilities are baffling to everyone who knows about the Force. Snoke belittles Kylo Ren after their fight on Starkiller Base, taunting him for being bested by “a girl who had never held a lightsaber.” Luke is mortified by the power Rey displays when he tries to give her a lesson. He tells her that he’s seen that raw strength once before—in his nephew—and he knows now to be afraid of it. Many fans assumed that this power in Rey was the result of a secret lineage, that we would learn she was either Luke or Leia’s child by The Last Jedi. Instead, the film offered us a different answer; Rey’s parents are no one special at all. They sold her and left her alone on Jakku, where she lived the majority of her life until now. So where did Rey’s awakened abilities come from? ...

Rey isn’t just a very special Force-user with a very special destiny. She is the sword of the Cosmic Force, here to bring the galaxy true balance for the first time in an age.

Although Emily Asher-Perrin doesn't discuss the religious aspects of her argument, it strikes me that if she's right--and I think she is--that Rey is finally the Christ figure Star Wars has noticeably lacked. Indeed, Papandrea points out that the Christology of the original Star Wars trilogy was Arian in nature: Luke becomes a savior rather than being born as a savior. In contrast, as Rey says to Luke, “Something is inside me has always been there. But now it’s awake.” To my mind, this suggests a more orthodox view of the nature of the savior than that of the original Star Wars.

Ultimately, of course, all this is just silly speculation. After all, Star Wars is the work product of secular humanist Hollywood elites who doubtless would be horrified to think that they were telling a tale that can be interpreted as a Christian allegory. But if this sort of speculation has any appeal, go buy the book: